Notable Quotables - 01/29/1996

January 29, 1996 - 1:00am

Hillary's Tough Media Scrutiny

"You also quote a letter in
[It Takes a Village] that Nelson Mandela wrote to one of his
daughters while he was in prison, and I'm paraphrasing a bit,
but he wrote that there is no personal misfortune that one
cannot turn into a personal triumph if one has the iron will and
the necessary skills. You clearly have an iron will, you clearly
are skilled. How are you going to turn this personal misfortune
into a personal triumph?"

"You think government
should do a lot more than it's doing in terms of making children
a priority, doing things for kids. We're clearly living in an
age where people are anti-government. How do you get across the
message that we all need to see everybody's kids as our own, we
need to have more programs, the government needs to be more
involved?"- Questions to Hillary Rodham Clinton from
Today substitute co-host Maria Shriver (who called the book
"really terrific" and "terrific"), January
16.

"I think it's been a pretty
good week for Mrs. Clinton. I think that a lot of people even
listening to the program so much today keep saying `What's the
crime? What did she do so wrong?' It's a little bit like the
budget. Mr. Clinton's protecting us and everybody is against
him. I think there is beginning to be the feeling of she's being
harassed too much."- Barbara Walters on This Week with
David Brinkley, January 14.

Forbes Annoys the Media

"Well it helps to know this
about a flat tax. It's a very radical notion and it's not nearly
so simple as it sounds and politicians are very careful not to
put all the ramifications on the table. But here are some of the
basics....It is supposed to encourage savings and investment
because profits would be tax free. But will plumbers be hurt
more than plutocrats?....Certainly the rich would do better than
the middle class....Here is something else that worries almost
everyone. You see no Western country has ever tried to make such
a seismic shift. How big will a flat tax need to be to raise the
money which the government needs to run the country?"-
ABC News anchor Peter Jennings on the January 15 World News
Tonight.

"Steve, isn't this a souped-up
version of the same kind of trickle-down Reaganomics that we saw
through already? Lower taxes were supposed to spur growth.
Instead we got record deficits."- Bryant Gumbel to
Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes, January 18 Today.

"[Forbes] paints a vision
of wealthy investors shifting their money out of T-bills and
into new factories and investments. It may not have worked that
way in the 1980s, when top tax rates were slashed and the
deficit soared, but that's the reason supply-siders are often
described as optimists."- Time Washington Bureau Chief
Dan Goodgame, January 29 issue.

"You may recall that Ronald
Reagan, on whom Forbes models himself, said his tax cuts would
balance the budget. Instead, they helped add trillions to the
national debt."- Newsweek reporters Howard Fineman and
Mark Hosenball, January 29 issue.

Freshmen: Insane, Naive,
Extreme, Mean

"The freshmen are the ones
who are seen as the obstacles to sane government."- Newsweek's Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin Group, December 30.

"More than half the GOP
freshmen have never held elective office before, and critics say
their newness to government makes them naive and extreme."- NBC News reporter Joe Johns, January 2 Today.

"They don't know how people
live. How could men come, be born of a woman and be as mean as
some of those young Republicans are?"- White House
reporter Sarah McClendon on The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder,
January 4.

Old Socialists Never Die, They
Just Report for ABC

Boston Globe reporter John Koch:
"What's your view of the lack of universal health care in
this country?"ABC reporter Dr. Timothy
Johnson: "Morally, it is outrageous that the wealthiest
country in the world cannot provide at least basic care for all
of its citizens, when so many other industrialized countries
have accomplished just that. Economically, it's outrageous,
because in fact we still do take care of people outside the
insurance or managed-care systems; but because we take care of
them at a later state, when they're sicker, we pay more, and
it's more difficult to effectively treat them. There is no
argument for anything but universal health care."-
January 14 Boston Globe Magazine interview.

Time Should Control America's
Thinking

"Time magazine, to use that
lingo, can be your intelligent agent. It can also help set the
agenda, so that we, in a time when everything is fractured, 500
channels, you know, hundreds of thousands of places to go on the
World Wide Web, what we do need in this country, and maybe in
this world, is common ground.... What I think Time magazine
should be looking for is the right tone, a set of core beliefs,
and set of core values, and I think that those are based on sort
of a sensible American common ground; an approach where we ask
certain basic values we all share like what's good for the kids?
You know, clean up after ourselves, certain faith in free minds
and free markets and a certain sense that, whatever the proposal
is, the most basic question we should ask is: yes, but does it
work?"- New Time Managing Editor Walter Isaacson on the
PBS talk show Charlie Rose, January 9.

Perpetuating the Myth of
"Cuts"

"In particular, these
executives said, Dole expressed unhappiness about the way the
networks have portrayed Republicans' efforts to cut spending on
Medicare and other federal programs."- Washington Post
reporter Paul Farhi on a Dole meeting with telecommunications
executives, January 12.

Joe Klein, Voice of Civil
Discourse

"He talks `devolution' to
the point of distraction, trying a bit too hard to stuff some
interesting ideas into a dim populist straitjacket, lobotomizing
himself. A more profitable route might have been to emphasize
his low-key style: a calm, smart, reasonable person in a party
that seems mesmerized by its lunatic fringe."- Newsweek
Senior Writer Joe Klein on GOP presidential candidate Lamar
Alexander, January 8.

CNN Needs a Laugh Track

"Mona, if you keep putting
people in jails we will end up like South Africa. We'll have
gulags like the former Soviet Union."- Washington Post
reporter Juan Williams on CNN's Capital Gang, December 31.

"I believe Paula Jones'
sister or sister-in-law, whoever it was, the relative in her
family who spoke about Paula Jones being somewhat of a
congenital liar. But you know I'm not here to engage in
character attacks on Paula Jones."- Newsweek's Eleanor
Clift on CNN's Crossfire, January 9.

Thin-Skinned Phil Lashes Out at
Rush

"Limbaugh's draft-avoiding,
non-churchgoing, non-voting, non-fact-checking, painfully
insecure triple-wife lifestyle all are topics delicately touched
upon by Franken. Where I think he really hits the jackpot,
though, is when he actually quotes Limbaugh directly as in:
...`I'm sick and tired of playing the one phony game I've had to
play and that is this so-called compassion for the poor. I don't
have compassion for the poor.' He may not have cancer, either,
and I would pray that he never have to walk that particular path
of pain: Yet who am I to say, or how can any of us know, the
ways of God in unlocking a heart grown hard? It could happen
more gently; I notice a couple of weeks ago, for instance, they
shut down that `Rush Room' at Blackie's House of Beef. Limbaugh
`is fading right now' in popularity among the restaurant's
patrons, according to catering manager Paul DeKoning. Is this a
great country, or what?"- Washington Post reporter Phil
McCombs (whom Limbaugh ridiculed in 1994) on Saturday Night Live
writer Al Franken's new book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot
and Other Observations, January 19 Style section.

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